eBay founder Omidyar to start local news service for profit

Posted by Nestor Bailly on November 19, 2009 at 12:00 PM

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, announced in a blog post that he plans on starting a local news service for Hawaii.

The service aims to cover public affairs and civic matters across the Hawaiian Islands and will launch in early 2010. At the moment, however, it is still in the planning phase and lacks a name and an editor, a position for which Omidyar tweeted an open call for applicants.

The online-only original-content news site aims, like the many other online news services popping up these days, to fill the void left by the cuts of traditional newspapers; Hawaii is no exception, with its two major papers having axed hundreds of jobs over the years (see papercuts for a neat map of who's being fired where).

However the main motivation is for the service to pull a profit, to prove that local news can support itself.

Howard Weaver wrote in an accompanying post that "I think tomorrow's best local public service journalism (like today's) is most likely to come from organizations built on success in the marketplace. I applaud any effort to create the journalism democracy needs -- profit, non-profit, hybrid or otherwise -- but my heart and my guts both tell me that journalism that meets real needs can pay its own way -- and should."

The news service -- not news website -- will be the product of Peer News, which Omidyar co-founded last year. Why 'service' and not 'website'? Well the emphasis of the service will be producing original content and reporting, and will employ actual reporters and editors, although at the moment there are no official employees.

Weaver sums up the project thus: "the new venture intends to demonstrate that a digitally native, technologically fluent web organization can profitably serve targeted readers who want sophisticated journalism focused on local civic affairs."

Source: paidContent